Keeping Telephone Records Private

Privacy advocates have plenty of challenges and goals, but the one most within our reach is passage of legislation to make ‘pretexting’ for people’s telephone records illegal. Pretexting is pretending to be somebody you’re not, to get something you probably shouldn’t have, to use in a way that’s probably wrong. It should not be legal to obtain phone records fraudulently or to solicit or sell such records, but if it can happen to a member of the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company like Hewlett-Packard, it can happen to any of us. The Energy and Commerce Committee did its part last year by passing a bill that made it abundantly clear where the federal government stands. We unanimously passed the “Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act,” and I hope we do it again this year.